The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [90]
So long as the gift is not withheld, the creative spirit will remain a stranger to the economics of scarcity. Salmon, forest birds, poetry, symphonies, or Kula shells, the gift is not used up in use. To have painted a painting does not empty the vessel out of which the paintings come. On the contrary, it is the talent which is not in use that is lost or atrophies, and to bestow one of our creations is the surest way to invoke the next. There is an instructive series of gifts in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Hermes invents the first musical instrument, the lyre, and gives it to his brother, Apollo, whereupon he is immediately inspired to invent a second musical instrument, the pipes. The implication is that giving the first creation away makes the second one possible. Bestowal creates that empty place into which new energy may flow. The alternative is petrifaction, writer’s block, “the flow of life backed up.”
To whom does the artist address the work? Long ago we said that a gift eventually circles back toward its source. Marcel Mauss put the same idea in slightly different terms: every gift, he wrote, “strives to bring to its original clan and homeland some equivalent to take its place.” And though it might be hard to say with any certainty where we will find the homeland of an inner gift, artists in every age have offered us myths to suggest where we should look. Some take their gifts to be bestowals of the gods or, more often perhaps, of a personal deity, a guardian angel, genius, or muse—a spirit who gives the artist the initial substance of his art and to whom, in return, he dedicates the fruit of his labor. Such, as we shall see, was Whitman’s myth. The initial stirrings of his work he took to be bestowals of his soul (or of a young boy, sometimes—or both), and his responsive act was to “make the work” (this being the motto that sat on Whitman’s desk) and speak it back to the soul, the boy.
Ezra Pound’s creative life was animated by a myth in which “tradition” appears as both the source and ultimate repository of his gifts. Pound’s first master, Yeats, articulated the sensibility: “I … made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters … I wished for a world where I could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the hangings that kept out the draft.” For Pound, I think, what gifts we have come ultimately from the gods, but a “live tradition” is the storehouse in which the wealth of that endowment is preserved. Pound speaks certain names over and over again—Homer, Confucius, Dante, Cavalcanti—the lineage of gifted souls whose works had informed his own. To the end of his days he dedicated a portion of his labor to the renewal of their spirits.
To offer but one more of these myths of closing the circle, of artists directing their work back toward its sources, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda took the beginnings of his art to lie not with spirits or with the past, but with something human, current, and almost anonymous. His gifts sprang, he felt, from brotherhood, from “the people,” and he quite consciously offered his art in recognition of the debt: “I have attempted to give something resiny, earthlike, and fragrant in exchange for human brotherhood.” He counted as “the laurel crown for my poetry” not his Nobel Prize but a time when “from the depths of the Lota coal mine, a man came up out of the tunnel into the full sunlight on the fiery